Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

Now this crap is spreading from the US to the UK. I know that it might not be that simple, but some of the UK policies have clearly been inspired by the cruel US system. People were in an uproar over the adoption of food stamps in the UK instead of emergency loans of cash. All the political crap and environmental problems, etc. are truly global now. The people in power float around above us all, policies in one country influence policies in another. We can't afford to be ignorant of what's going on. But it's so hard to pick out the signal from the noise sometimes. - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

Not to minimize how awful it is, but just from the first paragraph, I think if this guy lived in the U.S., he'd be dead, because they would've cut off his health insurance as soon as he stopped working. - Victor Ganata

I'm distracting myself for a short time, but my fury about the proposed food stamp cuts is still there. I have to think some more about what to do. - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

"Among the many scars of the recession, the most intolerable should be the pangs of chronic hunger that still assail a stunning 14.5 percent of the nation’s households, according to the Department of Agriculture’s latest survey. A decade ago, the figure was 11 percent — a group defined as regularly suffering food “insecurity,” or having 26 percent less to spend on food than households not going hungry. The survey shows that food insecurity rose with the recession and has remained stubbornly high." - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

I cannot believe that they passed this horrific bill. http://www.nytimes.com/2013... Is the revolution coming now? Or do more people have to feel the pain directly to even care??? They have just tried to inflict so much anguish on already suffering people. I feel my bile rising. My course of action for today was to follow local food banks and urban farms on Facebook and Twitter, and I plan to start going to farmers markets to get better acquainted with the local food sources. I want to know how to take care of myself, my friends and family, and learn enough to maybe teach others how to really make food. Might just have to leave altogether, with all the guns floating around with desperate hungry people. Where we'll go, I'm not sure. - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

"It was the end of buying and selling. For the majority of us who live within the capitalist system but aren't of the neoliberal breed of capitalist, catastrophe means no more mortgage payments, no cell phone surveillance, never again having to bicker over what is or isn't a preexisting condition. Catastrophe voids all obligation, makes the world anew." - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

"A civilization which for any reason puts a human life at a disadvantage; or a civilization which can exist only by putting human life at a disadvantage; is worthy neither of the name nor of continuance. And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea." - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

LOVE the captions. I don't think that doohickey would burn your house down, Kamilah, honest! - Stephen Mack

Maybe not, but I really don't trust us with it. Specifically, I don't trust *me* with it. Something is bound to go wrong if we touch the thing... - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

It's a football player with a giant apricot floating over his butt, standing in a field of cilantro. Let me explain how this happened. It isn't surrealism, this isn't dream imagery. It's more of a puzzle. Like many of my paintings, it started with word association. My goal was to represent the color Calcutta Curry (a shade of yellow that is color # 180 in Naomi Kuno's Colorscape book). So, as I often do, I took an oblique approach to the problem. - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

Right now, I like for my paintings to have three layers: a real object sitting in front of me, a drawing of a detail from a photo, and a drawing of a still from a video in the background. The cilantro in the foreground is based on a real plant that I bought at Meijer. Why cilantro? Cilantro was the first ingredient of a Bengali curry that I never actually got around to making. (Bengali because Calcutta, or Kolkata, is in the Indian state of West Bengal. Is some of the rest of the painting starting to make sense? I'll get to that...) - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

The next layer is the floating apricot. I deliberately selected the most butt-shaped fruit I could find. I would have preferred a peach, but the apricot had a better shape. Why a butt? The title "Oh, Calcutta!" comes from a slightly dirty French pun, which became a dirty painting, which inspired a nude Broadway musical in the 1970s. I found it when I searched for a "soundtrack" for this painting, which ended up being a Pandora station built around the track "Oh, Calcutta!" by the funk band The Meters. There's a lot of Hammond organ on there... - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

Finally, the football player. He plays for the Cincinnati Bengals. I made Vine videos out of found footage of the Bengals, then selected a still with one of the players sticking his butt out just so. Oh, Calcutta! - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

"Malcolm Burrows and Gregory Sutton, a pair of biologists from the University of Cambridge in the U.K., discovered that juveniles of the species [Issus coleoptratus] have an intricate gearing system that locks their back legs together, allowing both appendages to rotate at the exact same instant, causing the tiny creatures jump forward." - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

Even I thought this was interesting and I hate bugs. Honestly, how humans and animals could come up with the same designs is amazing. - Zulema ❧ spicy cocoa tart

:o - chaz2b

"Plenty of science fiction shows us the political and social fallout of an apocalypse. But what will the end times do to our pop culture? "Mr. Burns", a play opening this month in New York, does a magnificent job plunging us into a post-pandemic future — by exploring how people will remember The Simpsons." - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

"Written by Anne Washburn and directed by Steve Cosson, Mr. Burns begins a few weeks after a horrific pandemic has wiped out most of civilization. We never see the carnage — we only hear about it in the form of rumors and stories shared by a small group of people around a campfire in the middle of the New England forest. As the play opens, the group is clutching guns and looking shellshocked. But they're also passing the time by trying to retell the story of the Simpsons episode Cape Feare." - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

"If oral history is all that remains of the Simpsons, what will happen to it over time? In a deliciously bizarre third act, set 77 years after the pandemic, we get to find out. There is no more backstage story. We are simply watching a play that is being staged in the future, where the Simpsons have become mythological figures fleeing from Springfield after Mr. Burns has wrecked it with his evil nuclear powers. The reference-heavy, Gen X irony of The Simpsons has turned into an opera, done in the style of an ancient Greek tragedy." - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

We bought some bedtime stories for him, including Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are. - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

I know, this looks kind of sad, but don't worry, Maxwell was unhurt and he was just fine afterwards. I'm about to post a photo of what happened next. His first haircut was at Cheatham & Moore Barber Shop in Indianapolis, which has been in business for decades. My Dad has gone there since we moved here over 25 years ago. He came along with us for Maxwell's first haircut. - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

Omg. He's so big! - Mary B: #TeamMonique

beautiful - Steve C, Team Marina

thank you - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

They look like tire treads. Check 'em out. - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

That's cool. If it were more common, I could see it being interesting for basket makers. Already has a pattern. - Spidra Webster

The style here reminds me of a Bill Plimpton cartoon. - Akiva

Watercolor On Paper, guys. Not a photo, not oil or acrylics or colored pencils, even. *Watercolor*. My mind is blown. I salute you, Mr. Salt. - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

This is insane, guys. I can't do justice to the original painting with my quick and dirty sketch, so I'll post an image of it here in a moment... - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)